ABACTherapeutics

Precision antimicrobial agents

ABAC Therapeutics is committed to finding therapeutic solutions for patients that are infected with highly antibiotic-resistant bacterial pathogens and that leave affected patients with few (or no) treatment options. Heads of national healthcare services, professional infectious diseases organizations and infectious diseases experts are warning that we facing a return to a pre-antibiotic era. Infections with such “superbugs” are increasing in both severity and frequency, and new drugs are needed to treat them now.

Medical need

The dramatic rise of multiply drug resistant (MDR) Gram-negative infections are of particular concern, and pose a serious clinical burden in terms of prevalence, mortality and healthcare costs. Incremental improvements to existing broad spectrum antibiotics are no longer capable of keeping up with the evolution of resistance. New antibacterials that have novel mechanisms of action and that are not cross-resistant with existing antibiotics are the most desired solution. However, finding such novel antibacterials has not been easy, noting that the molecular mechanism of action of the latest broad antibacterials is 40 years old, despite enormous efforts in pharma to find new agents.

These new pathogen-specific antibacterials will seek to:

Reduce high mortality, by being effective in severely immuno-compromised or co-morbid patients that develop MDR infections.
Decrease length of stay in the hospital by increasing efficacy.

Minimize the development of acquired resistance, by limiting the antibacterial selection pressure to only the targeted organism.

ABAC Therapeutics’ first targets of highest urgency are the infections caused by the “Big Four” Gram-negative bacteria: Pseudomonas aeruginosa, Acinetobacter baumanii, Klebsiella pneumoniae, and Escherichia coli. But the pathogen-specific principle applies to all bacteria species.

The ABAC Therapeutics Vision

We need targeted antibiotics that kill specific pathogens irrespective of where in the body they are causing disease, rather than general agents that kill any pathogen in a particular body site. Soon, point of care diagnostic techniques will be rapid, cost-effective and widely used. Precision antimicrobial agents (pathogen-specific and narrow spectrum) will replace broad spectrum antibiotics.

Domingo Gargallo-Viola, 2008

Precision treatments of serious bacterial infections with pathogen-specific, novel-mechanism antibacterials that selectively eliminate the targeted pathogen while sparing the normal flora and minimizing the selective pressure on non-targeted strains